WoW – More fun together!

Bags of Gold

That icon you probably instantly recognize as a Netherweave bag. Most people have a few of these on their alts or alts’ banks. You main has no doubt been upgraded with bigger bags but it’s hard to beat the price on these guys. For anywhere between 6 and 20 gold you can get a 16 slot bag.

They’re also the foundation of my fortune. Oh, I’ve made some good money selling mats, or things we pick up while questing; top end gear, enchants, glyphs, etc. But Netherweave bags are the bonds of my online stock portfolio; not huge money makers, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to make some gold.

I’m not writing this post to convince you to invest in making Netherweave bags. In fact anyone on Winterhoof who is reading this should stay out of the market entirely, ok? :) My point is that everyone who wants a little money should find a niche market that they really understand, and own it. Let’s look at the Netherweave example again.

A Netherweave bag has really simple mats; Netherweave cloth, and one vendor-purchased thread. The conversion between Netherweave cloth and Netherweave bags is easy. One stack of twenty Netherweave makes a single bag. That makes figuring out costs easy!

Netherweave drops from Burning Crusade mobs, and drops pretty well too. But if you want to make money on these bags, don’t farm the mats. It’s just not worth it. Buy the cloth from people who are farming it, or leveling through Outlands.

What I do is I have a ceiling for Netherweave cloth purchases, and both a ceiling and a floor for Netherweave bag sales. I’ll buy stacks of cloth for less than 5 gold. Any Netherweave out there cheaper than that, I buy, even if I’ve got a good stock. Netherweave tends to have nasty spikes and I don’t want to be out!

When the cloth arrives, I turn it all into bolts of Netherweave right away. That takes up a lot less bag space than all those stacks. Then I make just as many bags as I want to sell, for the same reason. Also making bags is slow. A dozen or so at a time is about all that’s reasonable.

I’ll sell my bags for between 8 and 12 gold. If someone’s selling for less than 8, I’ll skip my listings and wait til his bags are gone, then put mine up. If the lowest priced bag on the AH is 15 gold, I still won’t list mine for more than 11g 99 s 99 c.

Why those numbers? I don’t have any real data to back me up. I don’t think the profit is worth my time for less than 8 gold. And after 12 the sales drop off. Who is buying these bags? Mostly people leveling alts. They’ll drop 40 gold on a set of four bags, no problem. Much more than that and they buy fewer, or grind rep with a city for the cheap 16 slot bag you can get that way.

I post lots of bags. The listing fees aren’t that much. I like to have at least 8 bags up at a time, more on weekends. Of course if you list a bunch you’re risking someone coming and undercutting you but the demand on the bag market is really steady and my bags will sell. It’s just a matter of time.

This week I’ve been using the Mobile AH app on the Armory to monitor my sales, to buy netherweave, and to repost auctions. It’s awesome and now that they’re adding Guild Chat I’m hooked. It’s just really handy to be able to do boring AH stuff remotely. Now there aren’t any helpful addons, so I only use it for markets I know really well – like Netherweave bags and cloth.

That was overnight. 17 bags sold at 12 gold each, means a minimum profit of just under 7 gold. 120 gold profit. Invariant isn’t my usual banker, so I just sent her enough money that she can buy the cloth auctions remotely. That way I don’t have to log into my banker to send the cloth first.

I don’t sell 17 bags a day; there are some days I don’t sell any. But I sell enough to provide a constant small gold influx. For something that takes me less effort than doing a few dailies, I’ve got my raiding repair bills covered. Yes, in a given week I make more from selling one Tol’vir keystone than all my bag sales; but the bag demand is constant and nothing else I sell is.

Again, the real key is NOT making Netherweave bags. It’s knowing other WoW players enough to identify a steady need. Raid consumables are a good one. Then analyze the components, decide if you can actually make money or not, and go to it. Even people who don’t play the Auction House can pick one or two commodities to provide, and make a nice little income. Give it a try. You don’t even have to read gold blogs!

I finally got Ado to pay 14k for my travelers Tundra mammoth. It took a lot of bargaining- originally he was only going to give me half, then 75%, but finally I won and he paid for the whole thing! And he still has over 100k gold! Now he said he’s working on making more money because who knows what mount I might want next! Hee hee!